At the Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, we are developing the Freesound Datasets platform for the collaborative creation of open audio datasets based on Freesound content. Our goal is to create datasets (collections of audio data) that can be used for research, for example enabling machines to hear and interpret sound similarly to humans. This would also allow us to implement innovative ways of searching and browsing content in Freesound from which you’ll eventually benefit

The first dataset we want to build is called FSD. FSD is a general-purpose dataset composed of Freesound content organised by the AudioSet taxonomy. The AudioSet taxonomy is a collection of sound categories that aims to hierarchically organize a wide range of everyday sounds. We have automatically pre-filled AudioSet categories with thousands of audio samples from Freesound. Now we need your help to confirm that we have assigned sounds to the right categories!

The usefulness of FSD for research depends on the accuracy of these assignments (also called “annotations”). Therefore, we need to validate these annotations in order to keep only the most accurate ones. We plan to achieve this via crowdsourcing, and you guys, the Freesound community, are our first stop . For you to be able to help us, we have set up an online platform at https://datasets.freesound.org in which you can listen to the sounds we’ve assigned to AudioSet categories and validate whether the assignments are correct or not. Our platform is in beta version now, so we would appreciate it if you took 15-20 minutes to use the platform, validate some annotations and leave some feedback for improvements before the official launch.

If you want to participate, you simply need to visit the following URL:

You can either choose the “beginners” or the “advanced” task, then you’ll be asked to login (you can use your Freesound account). Follow the guidelines on screen and validate one sound category. Then, please fill in the following form to give us some feedback: